For a first-time lawmaker, coal promoter Ulrich Freese made the most ofChancellor Angela Merkel’s pledge to counter rising power prices.
Freese, a Social Democrat former mining-union executive, won a parliamentary seat on Sept. 22, even as Merkel’s bloc defeated his party in national elections. As the two sides negotiated a coalition government, he inserted a commitment to use lignite, one of the most polluting forms of coal, to bridge the gap in Germany’s energy mix and rein in the second-highestelectricity prices in the European Union after Denmark’s.
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That meshes with Vattenfall’s plan to extend strip mining in eastern Germany’s Lusatia region, some 150 kilometers (94 miles) southeast of Berlin, where more than 80 villages have been demolished and residents resettled to extract lignite.
The coalition contract’s wording on coal shows that Merkel’s prospective government is giving “high priority” to secure, affordable energy and recognizes the need to increase “market integration” of renewable sources...
...Gas and coal plants are “necessary to balance out the renewable energies and their fluctuating generation.”